Years ago, caskets were converted from wood to metal, and have remained essentially unchanged for the past fifty or more years, both as to construction and ornamental appearance. During the past few decades, several attempts have been made to reduce the weight of caskets by producing them from fiberglass. Such construction requires considerable handwork and has never made serious inroads in the marketplace.
Consideration has also been given to use of other materials such as molded sheets of asbestos cement as evidenced by U.S. Pat. No. 3,050,817, molded thermoplastic material such as in U.S. Pat. No. 3,353,238 and a continuous one-piece thermoformed sheet plastic as is illustrated in U.S. Pat. No. 3,487,513. Of these, the two molded types of caskets use those materials for the shell or lower, corpse-receiving part of the casket. The '513 patent uses the thermoformed material for the interior lining of the panel lid or cover for the shell. A similar result is achieved by U.S. Pat. No. 4,137,613 in which a head liner is specifically stated to be formed by utilizing the vacuum forming process. It is acknowleged that it would not be inventive to produce a casket lid by vacuum forming, since that is essentially what is achieved in the aforementioned '817 patent where the lid is produced as a single piece from asbestos cement. But to the best of my knowledge, there remains a need for a lightweight, leakproof casket which is capable of utilizing traditional ornamental designs made of relatively inexpensive materials and construction. Furthermore, there remains a need for such a casket which is easily produced in either a standard width or an extra-wide or oversized dimension for a large body.
Typically, burial vaults; i.e. the box in which caskets can be placed, are cast or molded of thick concrete walls. A concrete slab top or cover is placed over the casket. My construction for the casket as disclosed herein can be effectively used for vaults as well as caskets.